8/6/2019 Antimatire
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Science fiction become science fact as experts find a way to
hold antimatterBy Terri Theodore
THE CANADIAN PRESS
VANCOUVER Antimatter fuelled the Starship Enterprise to go where
no man had gone
before, but in reality it remained strictly in the realm of
science fiction.
Until now.
In an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature,
scientists explain how that fiction may
have taken a step closer to fact with the creation of a type of
magnetic bottle that can hold
antimatter long enough for scientists to try to unlock the
mystery of the antiatom.
About 15 Canadian experts from Simon Fraser University, the
University of B.C., the
University of Calgary, York University and the TRIUMF national
research lab in Vancouver
were part of the 42-person team to make the discovery in
Geneva.The exciting device has the usually sedate scientific world
in a froth.
This is really cool, said Marcello Pavan, a physicist with
TRIUMF. Were talking about
trapping antiatoms for goodness sakes, this is, you know, Star
Trek.
Scientists have been creating antimatter for 15 years, but it
moves at about the speed of light
and is quickly destroyed. Pavan said the magnetic bottle is able
to capture antimatter for about
one-tenth of a second before it self-destructs.
This is science fiction become science fact, he said in an
interview Wednesday.
Antimatter is one of the mysteries of science.
Matter is essentially anything that has mass and occupies space
basically everything on
Earth.
Its believed matter and antimatter are identical, except that
they have an opposite charge andantimatter destroys itself almost
immediately.
Now that they can see antimatter, scientists might be able to
answer some of the questions
about any differences between the two.
Pavan said the amazing device may give some insight into what
happened after the Big Bang
created the universe.
Physicists have always theorized that when the universe came
into being an equal amount of
matter and antimatter was created, but all the antimatter
disappeared.
This is like the 900-pound elephant sitting on your couch, you
cant ignore it, the fact that we
dont know what on earth happened to all this antimatter, which
should have been created at the
Big Bang, Pavan said.
The project, called the ALPHA Collaboration, was based at CERN,
the European Organizationfor Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. CERN
is probably best known for its large Hadron
Collider, a giant white donut-like structure that is the worlds
largest and highest energy particle
accelerator.
The antiatoms are produced in a vacuum at CERN and the life of
the antiatom was extended in
the bottle, which is the size of about two of the tubes from
inside a roll of paper towels.
In Geneva, Simon Fraser University physics professor Michael
Hayden was just heading out
Wednesday to celebrate the release of the groups findings.
